Jerry Bridges Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Jerry Bridges was a staff member of The Navigators, speaker, and Evangelical Christian author that is best known for his debut work “The Pursuit of Holiness.”

The author was born in Texas in 1929 and lived with his parents and his brother Jack in a small four-room house in the small town of Tyler. He grew up a partially deaf, cross-eyed boy who lost his mother when he was only fourteen.
While he grew up in poverty he was a hard worker and a very good student who worked the paper route and a job at the local Safeway during the weekends.

While he was brought up in a Baptist church and responded to an altar call several times, no one had ever explained to him the true meaning of being born again.

Since his family did not have the money for him to attend college, he would ultimately join the US Navy, which he believes was a divine act of providence.

It was while he was visiting home a few months later that he had a chance to converse with a local pastor about the assurance of salvation that he realized he was not really born again.
That night, he prayed for God to be born again and immediately has an assurance which he never had before.

In 1951, Jerry got his general engineering degree from the University of Oklahoma and was commissioned as a Navy ensign. For the four years he had been at the institution, he had received the outstanding academic midshipman every year.
Shortly after graduating, he met a colleague in the Navy who took him to a Navigator Bible study. He was hooked right from the first night and continued to attend the Bible study meetings until he left the Navy.

After only two years of service, he got a medical discharge after sophisticated equipment showed that he had hearing loss in one ear. For Jerry, this was a sign from God that he needed to take a new direction in his life.
Thereafter, he moved to Southern California where he got a job with an airplane manufacturing company. During this time, he used to pen technical manuals for flight lines and shop personnel.

He believed God put him there to teach him how to explain complex material. At that time, he was living with a Navigator couple who brought him to a Colorado Springs Navigator Conference in 1955.
It was there that he met Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators who asked him if he would be interested in working at the organization’s headquarters.

Upon arriving in Colorado Springs for training and work, he was expecting that he would be sent to minister overseas.

But he was given a local assignment and spent about forty years working in admin as treasurer, office manager, and the most fulfilling and challenging of all when he was made vice president of corporate affairs.
It was while he held the latter role that he decided that members of the organization needed to participate in Social Security and established a retirement plan.

During his time with the Navigators, he was known as a man with a deep commitment to the Scripture and Jesus who lived a godly and simple life just as he taught.

He would provide godly insights with quiet humor to become one of the most respected writers and speakers in the Navigators organization. In the 1970s, NavPress released several booklets of conference sessions given by speakers including Jerry.
When LeRoy Eims read “Willpower” by Jerry he was so inspired he told him he needed to think about writing. In 1978, he published “The Pursuit of Holiness,” a work that would go on to be very popular as it sold more than a million copies.

Jerry Bridge’s novel “The Pursuit of Holiness” is a practical, challenging, and piercing charge for Christians to live holy lives.

The author asserts that Christians need to strive to achieve a higher level of following and that too many Christians fail to live holy lives due to compromising on what it means to be holy.

For Jerry Bridges, holiness is about aspiring to be holy like God rather than trying to be just as holy as our neighbors.

It is when we have God as our moral standard that we can come to see his moral hatred of sin, his absolute purity that will make us understand the evilness of sin. It is by doing this that we can see God in his terrifying, awesome, and true holiness.
In this work, Bridges asks believers to seek holiness through submission to the word of God. Through consistent and humble reading and practicing of the scripture, Christians can develop a desire to live in the real of the Holy Spirit.
He asserts that it is hypocritical for us to pray to God to give us victory over our sins yet continue to be careless when it comes to reading and doing the scriptures.

Another way he believes we achieve holiness is through obedience, which he asserts can only come from having the scriptures strongly fixed in our minds.

“The Respectable Sins” is based on the premise that Christians tend to focus on the big sins in other people’s lives but often fail to look at the sin in their own lives.

As such, this work does not discuss sins such as murder or adultery but instead, it devotes chapters to sins people often ignore such as envy, anger, judgementalism, discontentment, selfishness, pride, and unthankfulness.
The first few chapters provide an overview of modern church culture and sin as he takes aim at how the church is not paying attention to these sins which are just as bad.

He also reminds us that it is important to seek God’s grace and repent for sanctification so that we can overcome these sins.

Since the chapters are about eight to ten pages, Jerry does not get too deep. Nonetheless, he often uses examples from his own experience to show how prevalent sin can be in individual lives.
Still, the chapters pack a good punch and as such, they are best read at a slower pace.

Every chapter hits in a different way and some will be relevant to your life way more than others but all of them will call you to repentance and some soul-searching.

“Trusting God” by Jerry Bridges is a work that asserts that most Christians usually find it harder to trust God than to obey him. Most people can deal with things when God’s expectations are laid out and they know what to do.
However, when we don’t understand what is happening, life gets messy and we cannot see the outcome or we do not like what is evident, it becomes easier to blame other factors rather than placing our trust in God and the plan he has for our lives.
According to Bridges, the moral will of God in the scriptures is reasonable and rational, even if sometimes we find the circumstances in which we are called upon to trust God often appear inexplicable and irrational.
Jerry asserts that the law of God is often good for us even in times when it would be convenient to not obey it.

While life circumstances are often in flux and sometimes appear to be grim or dreadful and even tragic or calamitous, obeying God usually works out according to God’s will.
It is impossible to know the frequency, duration, or extent of the adverse and painful circumstances in which we are called upon to trust God.

Nonetheless, it is still important to obey and trust God rather than question his goodness and doubt his sovereignty.